About

Redoing Gender is an online initiative dedicated to providing a platform for youth to contribute to the discourse on gender and gender-related issues within their community and elsewhere. It also seeks to bring into the limelight those working tirelessly behind the scenes by sharing the stories that matter.

Hence, Redoing Gender is a digital vault of conversations with teenagers and academicians, along with creative content (prose, poetry, artwork) which is crowdsourced. The initiative additionally seeks to incorporate news and educational inputs to highlight issues and concerns related to gender roles. Accordingly, through conversations and creative content, Redoing Gender seeks to understand traditional and non-traditional gender roles.

This initiative is inspired by the seminal article, ‘Doing Gender’ by Candace West and Don Zimmerman, published in 1987. The article explores how gender is not an innate individual quality, but is instead a psychologically ingrained social construct. In other words, we are made to ‘do’ gender. Today’s technology gives us the opportunity to revisit this discussion using social media. As noted by Jessica Rose, et al, “Digital formats…represent exciting possibilities for individuals who can explore the freedom of presenting a physical self that might differ from the one they present or perform in everyday life or form socially-defined expectations.”